Don't Ask me, I'm Just the Writer

After slaving away for hours to perfect my latest piece of writing, I had about two days of self-satisfaction after publishing it before people started telling me what I'd got wrong.

As I've explained previously, the Heroes Universe is a piece of collaborative fiction. I'm the one putting the words down on the web site, but there's a whole team behind me generating ideas for me to use. And they wasted no time in telling me I'd misrepresented several of their ideas in Room XIII.

So: Charlie Haversham wasn't 16 in 1940, he was 14. Yvette D'Evreux wasn't trying to steal a Spitfire when arrested, she was trying to steal a Hurricane. And a couple more minor points were of questionable interpretation.

My first thought was to rewrite the text and quietly republish the corrected version.

Then I realised, I'm writing in the persona of Sir Royston Thomas, and I wasn't mistaken, he was. So in my persona as his editor, all I needed to do was add some extra footnotes explaining that he was mistaken, but leave his "mistaken" text intact. Problem solved!

So that's what the "second edition" of Room XIII now contains. If you've already read the story, there's no need to read it again because nothing important has changed. If you haven't yet read it, you can read the "correct" version here.

I'm going to follow the same approach for subsequent chapters of Room XIII. It doesn't work for the other stories on the site, but it's appropriate for how I've chosen to write this one.

Room XIII

 The newest section on the site is the story of super-heroes in World War 2, which I've called Room XIII. Why that title? You'll have to read it to find out.

When I started developing the Heroes universe, I knew there had to be super-heroes in World War 2. Because that's when super-hero comics started. (Technically shortly before the war, but in practice the big boom came in the war years.) My biggest inspiration for this was Roy Thomas, whose writing for Marvel Comics in the 1970s made liberal use of actual 1940s' comic characters to add a depth of history to the contemporary universe he was helping to create. (He wasn't the first: Stan and Jack had begun it when they re-introduced the war-time character Captain America into their modern stories.)

So, inspired by this approach, I had a handful of characters in the Heroes universe of the 1980s whose backgrounds stretched back to those years, and although it never had a big impact on Strikeforce, it was still an important part of the mythology for me.

When I began setting stories in the universe's past, then, I obviously wanted to include World War 2 as one of the eras I covered. I had pre-established characters and concepts that I could use, but characters alone don't make a story. I needed a narrative setting that I could place those characters into.

My initial ideas didn't include super-heroes at all, which was a bit silly considering that was my whole inspiration for doing it. I started by imagining a group of French resistance fighters. My players vetoed that idea immediately, possibly anticipating it degenerating into a hunt for the painting of the fallen madonna with the big boobies (and, honestly, it probably would have). My next idea was having a group of ex-criminals recruited for commando missions (an obvious rip-off of The Dirty Dozen). I felt this had potential, but it didn't completely come together until I stopped resisting the idea of super-heroes ... or, more correctly in this case, super-villains.

So that's how Room XIII came into being. There were a few tweaks to the format, mainly driven by players' ideas, but the basic concept was strong enough to allow a range of different character types and a variety of different plot lines. And, most importantly, the narrative let me pick up plot threads that reached forward from previous eras and backward from the original Strikeforce stories.

There are a lot of chapters in this story, and I'm not going to be adding them quickly. But hopefully I've made the introduction intriguing enough to make people come back for them when they're written.

Updates

 Two new articles in the Encyclopaedia Galactica section:

• Bouncing Being, stalwart member of the Star Guard.
• Science Moon-E, a not-very-important scientific outpost.

That's all for this week. More strange new worlds and new life and new civilizations coming soon. And maybe a timeline of the Emissariate. Maybe that should be my next big project.

Updates

 No new pages this time, but updates to a couple of existing pages:

• The Star Guard membership membership roll call has been expanded to include more current members. A few historical details have been corrected or tidied up.
• The list of Galactic Threats has been expanded with new entries.

Next time I get a chance to update, I'm going to add pages for some more of the planets listed in the Encyclopaedia Galactica.

Encyclopaedia Galactica

 It's been almost a year since my Game switched its focus to the galaxy beyond our planet. A year of really hard work.

As I explained some time ago, when I began the Game in 1987 I initially wanted a science fiction setting, but soon realised that setting it on Earth in, well, 1987, made my job so much easier: 

This gave me a huge advantage over running a pure science-fiction game. I didn't need to invent all the little trivial details such as how people cooked their dinner in this world, and the players didn't need to ask me. And of course that's exactly why I decided to time travel back to 1987 instead of setting the whole thing in the future.

Well, now we're in outer space, adventuring around a galactic empire spanning multiple worlds, species, and technologies.

Half the hard work comes in preparation. I need to create a constant stream of new planets to visit. Not quite one a week, but not far off. No planet needs to be as detailed as Earth is. I don't need complete maps and detailed histories, because the players will only interact with a small part of it before moving on. I need about as much detail as, say, a Star Trek planet has. Physical characteristics, population, technology, politics, a history outline, key personalities ... actually, it's a lot of detail, some of which I need to share with my players, some of which I can, or even must, keep to myself.

The rest of the hard work comes in the Game itself, where I have to constantly answer questions about the environment on the fly, and naturally I haven't thought through every minute detail. It's just not possible.

There are short cuts, of course. I can always fall back on my standard approach of stealing stuff, then making sure the players can figure out where I've stolen it from and can fill in the details themselves. If I rip off Forbidden Planet, for example (and yes, I have), then I don't need to explain too much about monsters from the id because the players all know what they are.

But it's still pretty much a full-time job, that I'm barely keeping on top of.

Now excuse me, I have to go and plot an interplanetary war (two very different planets, politics, spaceships, weapon technology, orbital mechanics, and I'm sure I've forgotten something ...).

I've put a small part of my documentation on the web site, organised into the Encyclopaedia Galactica. I'll try to continue to expand it over the next few weeks. But, honestly, typing up my notes and making them pretty isn't my top priority at the moment.

Updates

 I am so far behind updating the History of the Universe, I know I will never complete the task.

I'm still going to work on it. I'm just not going to commit to how often.

Today's update is an article on the planet Esposi-2.

Dave

The whole Game web site is dedicated to David Allan, for reasons I have previously given.

I just want to add that this month, 37 years after the Game began, I am re-using a plot idea Dave gave me on day one. I'm running a story line I literally called "Ten Electrons". 37 years later, Dave is still in the Game.

And I still have the best players in the world.